Erased Tapes piano balladeer Douglas Dare has been labelled as “one to watch” by Mary Anne Hobbs. His Daylight Music debut appearance gives those of us who’ve missed out on his music over the last three years an opportunity to judge for ourselves. See below is a song from his 2013 debut EP ‘Seven Hours’, followed by a sixteen-minute small-room performance from Paris, showcasing a live blend of shimmer-rolling neo-classical keyboard work, jazz-weather cymbals and occasional threads of electronica. His delivery (full of emotional focus and rising intensity) involves heartbreaking folk swoops, edgings of Celtic soul and what at first sounds like a stream of post-Radiohead angst: it ultimately reveals itself as being more akin to a Schubert lieder with a window on both James Blake and ‘Astral Weeks’.

A classically-trained trio of Stuart Barter, Rob Wicks and Toby Knowles, London pop ensemble Left With Pictures operate in a similar area, offer a rippling chamber pop with solemn, cavernous grand piano, strands of ecstatic electronic dance and folk instrumentation. Along the way, they manoeuvre along a line which divides the crowd-pleasing piano-pop of Keane, the weightless swoon of a momentary Morrissey and the compelling ancient-futurist folk of Eyeless In Gaza (Stuart’s lovely edge-of-the-ritual vocal often coming across like a gentler, more pop-polished take on of EIG’s Martyn Bates). I’m not absolutely sure what to make of them, and sometimes feel that they’re a little too polite for their own good – but, if so, they also sound like politeness briefly overwhelmed and catching its breath, revelling in the moment of freefall.

What’s known (or spun) about Stranger Stranger is that they’re the husband-and-wife duo of Philip Solari and Marinda Lavut, that they’re Canadian, that “they have bossa, they have jazz”, and that they were plucked from a life of pavement busking after being discovered outside the Montreal Jazz Festival by two of its owners. They immediately won a place at the following year’s festival on the strength of their musical skills. It’s like a reality TV rags-to-fame fairytale, done right. This year, they’ve been resident in London while recording their debut album with Laura Mvula’s producer Steve Brown, and it looks as if they’re going to be playing a whirl of low-key-but-hot-ticket gigs around the capital, for which this is an early taste.

Stranger Stranger also seem to be one of those increasingly rare entities – a growing word-of-mouth sensation, eschewing multimedia methods. They seem to have entirely avoided the latterday rash of Youtube cellphone footage; they’ve not engaged in teaser campaigns of embedding tracks in superblogs: they don’t even seem to have any kind of a homepage. I’ve got no clips, I’ve got no video, so I’ve got little choice other than to simply add to the growing wordpile. The buzz around them seems to be entirely made up of speech and text, as if we’d all headed back to the ’60s or the days of print’n’paste fanzines… and it’s strangely refreshing.

As ever, there’s a Daylight interval act as well – this time, it’s the return of Sunday Driver’s Joel Clayton on sitar, providing “Eastern sounds with a grungy twang.”

‘The Eclipse Collaborations’ is a thirty-minute video accompanying voice-looper Georgina Brett‘s new album. Although the video made its formal debut when it was played online and transnationally back in June (as part of the 2016 Solstice event) the formal launch party is taking place at New River Studios (the new home for Georgina’s ambient/progressive Tuesday’s Post night). It includes a full screening of the video, a bar and DJs, interactive visuals provided by Tuesday’s Post regulars Hanzo and Rucksack Cinema, and an appearance by speculative writer Greg Sams (who amongst other things has presented the idea that our sun is a “conscious, providing entity…”).

Descriptions taken from the Club Integral press release, with additions and augmentations from me…

“A one-off Club Integral event featuring four of the finest women contemporary improvisers working today.

“In the late 1990s, Nagoya musican Yuki Kaneko was a psychedelic rock guitarist working with Acid Mothers Temple associates Floating Flower. A decade-and-a-half ago, she changed tack to retrain as a violinist and now plays both acoustic and electric instruments in a mixture of styles. Initially training and working in Indian Hindustani and Carnatic violin styles, Yuki has since incorporated synthesizer and laptop into her musical resources: she’s also reincorporated her psychedelic roots in order to explore ambient music, electronica and improvisation. Yuki’s recent projects have included a duo with fellow experimental violinist Yuji Katsui and recurring work with an ensemble led by former Taj Mahal Travellers vocalist Tokio Hasegawa.

“At around the same time that Yuki was becoming involved with Floating Flower, Naomi Motomura was playing guitar with the final 1990s lineup of the long-lived Japanese band Zelda, an all-female new wave/multi-genre group which drew on multiple approaches (including punk, funk, reggae, roots and experimentalism) to form their particular brand of pop. During the twenty years since the end of Zelda, Naomi absorbed various other musics. She resurfaced in 2013 with a solo album, ‘Whole’, which displayed her undiminished guitar skills, her mastery of looping pedals and her knack for a melodic and experimental reshaping of her earlier rock ideas.

“Tokyo-born but a longtime London resident, singer and multi-instrumentalist Yumi Hara has been performing improvised jazz based/prog-tinged/eclectic-experimental music for many years, with her work drawing on everything from Terry Riley and Rock In Opposition to funk and Japanese lullabies. Once a member of cult-pop favourites Frank Chickens, she established herself in the mid-’90s as a determined art-music curator by helming the Bonobo’s Ark music evenings (which drew in contributors including Charles Hayward, Roger Cawkwell, Clive Bell, Kazuko Hohki and many others.).

Yumi has since gone on to work in a variety of situations with a variety of musicians. Her collaborators have included Canterbury/Henry Cow/Faust veterans such as Hugh Hopper, Daevid Allen, Jean-Herve Peron, Geoff Leigh, Chris Cutler, John Greaves, Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson; bands and projects which have sprung out of these associations have included the trio you me & us, post-Cow quartet The Artaud Beats, Faust/Cow hybrid Jump For Joy! and the Lindsay Cooper repertoire band Half The Sky. Yumi is also active in plenty of other projects – both solo and in collaborative duos and ensembles – and is an established experimental composer in her own right.

“A self-taught outsider/multi-media artist since 1980, Poulomi Desai has spent nearly four decades exploring different kinds of work from her London hometown, Born in Hackney and an early practitioner of street theatre, she’d set up the Hounslow Arts Co-op before she’d turned fifteen and has gone on to divide her time between graphic design, curation (she’s run Usurp Art in Harrow since 2010) and multimedia performance art. The latter incorporates text, photography, live electronics and a sitar played with bows, kitchen knives, axes and massage tools, augmented by distortion pedals, modified cassette decks playing field recordings, circuit bent toys, optikinetic instruments, slide projectors and broken banjos.

Poulomi’s live work embraces elements of noise and industrial sounds as well as complex explorations of chance, challenge and subversion; with the sitar playing in particular being a conscious response and reaction to the idea of ‘authenticity’ (seeking to break the rules and expectations of how a ‘sacred’ instrument should be played, including the strictures and assumptions put upon the player and her identity).

“The evening will feature performances by two duos (a violin-and-electric guitar performance by Yuki and Naomi; a set combining Yumi on piano/harp/vocals and Poulomi on sitar and electronics) followed by a quartet performance of all four musicians together.”